Wall Street Teams with Bitcoin Developer

“Access to comprehensive price discovery is vital to accurately value the cryptocurrency market,” a newly created ICE landing page reads. “Our Cryptocurrency Data Feed, available on the ICE Consolidated Feed, gives you access to streaming real-time, end of day and historical data for the most actively traded digital currencies.”

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE) owns several exchanges from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to subsidiaries in Singapore and Netherlands. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s a Fortune 500 company looking to enter the burgeoning cryptocurrency market. Blockstream is a private company geared toward bitcoin core applications, especially sidechains, and funds many bitcoin core projects, and will act as its partner.

The Feed will include “broad coverage” of six major cryptocurrencies: bitcoin core, ethereum, litecoin, dash, ripple, and bitcoin cash. The collaboration also promises “to offer multi-asset and multi-venue data from cryptocurrency exchanges globally, which will be available in the first quarter of 2018,” capturing “nearly 80% of crypto-exchange trading volume for the most active currency pairs.”

“All crosses are captured and normalized,” ICE explains, “which creates a unique sequence number, details on where the trade took place, and other relevant order book data such as quantity, price, currency and timestamp.” ICE also promises over “two years of Bitcoin (XBT) history; XBT/USD averages over 200,000 updates per day; in excess of 600,000 updates per day across all digital pairs.”

Low Latency, Quality Information

The new feed “initially include data from more than 15 cryptocurrency exchange venues globally,” ICE COO Lynn Martin is quoted as saying, “With the broad array of cryptocurrencies and exchanges, and given the price variances between exchanges, it’s critical that investors have a comprehensive source of pricing information.”

The six cryptocurrencies will be “measured against the U.S. Dollar and other major currency pairs,” the announcement continued. “Blockstream works with cryptocurrency exchanges around the world and consolidates the disparate data sets into a normalized and standardized data source that includes real-time and historical trade information, as well as other relevant order book data such as quantities, prices, currencies, and timestamps.”

Lynn Martin

The team’s hope is to limit latency in price discovery, providing as close to real-time and quality information as possible. “The ICE Data Services Consolidated Feed provides access to over 450 normalized real-time market data feeds and is part of ICE’s Connectivity service,” they stress.

It’s too early to know just yet if The Feed will compete with Coinmarketcap and other aggregators already established, but perhaps Wall Street professionals will be drawn to the legitimacy and gravitas ICE brings, furthering the crypto mainstreaming trend.

What do you think this teaming will accomplish? Let us know in the comments section below.